Slow XP booting?
It may seem that when you first installed your Windows XP, it booted up really fast. You tend to wonder all the horrible stories you’ve read that Windows has a very slow boot up. A few years down the road, you feel it–you begin twiddling your fingers and asking yourself as to why it takes you 3 minutes to be able to do anything on your PC. What do you do?
According to the experts the best way to go about this is to find the source:
Legitimate programs usually put an icon in the SysTray, next to the clock on the Windows Taskbar. Right-clicking an icon will often let you tell the program not to load. However, Microsoft provides msconfig, a good utility for controlling how Windows starts up. To run it, click Start, select Run, type msconfig in the box and click OK. The Startup tab on the far right lists the programs being loaded, but it’s worth looking through the other tabs. Microsoft has a trouble-shooting guide to using it: search Google for Q310560.
More info here.